Path Solutions implements iMAL Islamic banking solution at Cihan Bank

8 March 2012

Path Solutions today announced the successful go live of iMAL at Cihan Bank, Erbil. Cihan, the first privately owned bank in Kurdistan first partnered with Path Solutions in October 2009 on this multi-lingual, multi-currency and multi-channel implementation.

Cihan is a running Retail Bank with a paid up capital of 150 Billion IQD i.e. 127 million USD. It has been operating since April 2009, providing its services through 7 branches all over the country. The bank is a member of Cihan Group which is one of the biggest groups in Iraq, with business lines spread in many fields such as cars trading, construction, education, media, insurance and general trading.

“The implementation at Cihan Bank encountered major challenges mainly due to the Iraqi banking environment in general and specifically in Erbil. The bank was operating without the existence of a banking system and therefore most of the operations were executed and maintained manually. The challenges were of a different kind, where lots of efforts and time were spent on convincing the end users to rely on a banking system prior to convincing them to go with iMAL ”, explained Alain Abou Khalil, SVP Professional Services, Path Solutions.

Abou Khalil continued: “We are excited to see the successful go live of iMAL - our first live user in Erbil out of 4 customers we have in Iraq. We pride ourselves on being able to support the specific needs of Cihan Bank, and ensuring we can serve their local requirements. iMAL will allow Cihan Bank to quickly deploy innovative Islamic banking products to an expanding customer base”.

The highly scalable infrastructure of iMAL Islamic banking solution will enable Cihan Bank to meet its projected expansion plans, whilst contributing to the economic growth of the country.

Naz Bajger, Director - Head of IT, Cihan Bank said: “We needed a very reliable banking solution that could provide us with the means for next generation growth. With the successful implementation of the best-of-breed iMAL Islamic banking solution, we now have a robust platform that will grow and evolve with us and will help us manage efficiently our network operations. I would like to thank the teams for their professionalism and constructive efforts in the implementation and support of this project particularly the Project Managers Abbas Aljawahiry and Dina Moh’d who were dedicated on a full time basis to deliver quality output. I am very glad to see that the joint efforts led to the success of this project”.

At a time of greater market regulation and increasing customer demands, Islamic banks need to reposition themselves. The seamless rollout of the iMAL Islamic banking solution at Cihan Bank illustrates nicely the performance of iMAL in boosting the bank’s competitiveness as well as the broadest experience of Path Solutions’ PS team in managing such challenging implementations.